The present invention relates to the visualization of anatomical structures and more particularly to the visualization of structures with their nearby surrounding area visible.
The rendering of anatomical structures, such as organs, is an important visualization tool for many medical applications. These medical applications include surgical planning, noninvasive diagnosis, and image-guided surgery.
The anatomical structures can be rendered directly using an appropriate transfer function, from a previously calculated segmentation mask, or from a pre-generated surface (polygonal mesh). All of these rendering techniques provide detailed visualization of the anatomical structure but completely masks out of the image the area surrounding these structures. This lack of surrounding area information significantly reduces the effectiveness of the visualization, and makes it very difficult to identify the exact location and orientation of the visualized structures. For example, one can render the coronaries tree branches. However, if only the coronaries trees are visible it becomes very difficult to distinguish between the left and right side, or where is up and down. It becomes very important to render the coronaries tree together with their surrounding area context. By being able to visualize coronaries nearby surrounding structures such as, the heart chambers and muscles, one can identify correctly the coronaries orientation and location in the body.
Straightforward rendering of anatomical structures and their nearby surrounding is not possible without significant visualization artifacts. For example, one can render the anatomical structure and then render the entire volume excluding the areas covered by the anatomical structure. Although, this will provide some surrounding area information it will cause many problems and artifacts. First, rendering the entire volume will display information from areas located far from the anatomical structure of interest, masking out important nearby information. Second, combining in an image rendering from areas of different distances from the observer (depth) will cause aliasing artifacts on the image.
Accordingly novel rendering methods are required that will provide nearby surrounding area rendering together with the anatomical structures of interest without any artifacts or masking of nearby information.